It's mainly because we're using a VPS, which always costs more.

For a VPS, $12.50 is actually very cheap

A VPS is a virtual private server, which means that we get a part of a dedicated server which we can manage as we see fit.

The Fan Hub has grown beyond shared hosting, so the cheap hosting isn't really something we can still use... our site has grown too big and too heavy on resources for that.

On a cheap webhost, you often get only a small percentage of computing power and RAM. If you cross those barriers, you will get blocked or put offline, or you'll be forced to pay a lot more.

On a VPS, you are assured control over a set amount of computing power (processor cores), a set amount of RAM and disk space. In our case, we have 1 virtual processor core, 1GB of RAM and 30GB of SSD disk space (and 2 TB of bandwith). That's more than enough for our site right now .

Our webhost is one of the cheapest (but most decent!) VPS providers around, and I've hosted the Fan Hub for over a year now with them, without not even 1 issue with them at all. So if you are interested in a VPS, feel free to join them. If you use my affiliate link for them, you also get $10 for free (which means 2 months for free on the cheapest plan), and you'll also support me/the Fan Hub: <a data-ipb="nomediaparse" href="https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=16782a6b1154%C2%A0">https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=16782a6b1154 </a>

Our previous host was Versio, a Dutch budget host which was fine in the beginning but we ended up having so many issues (and downtime!) with them that I finally moved away from them.